


all those wrong colors

by endquestionmark



Category: Daredevil (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-06
Updated: 2015-05-06
Packaged: 2018-03-29 06:32:54
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,104
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3885979
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/endquestionmark/pseuds/endquestionmark
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Vanessa — yes, she asks him at first, in the morning, when she is still tangled in her sheets (cotton, but with a sufficiently high thread count that it isn’t as much of a sensory issue as it could be) and he is dressing for the day, before she rises in a fall of fabric and fixes his tie, laying her hands flat on his chest as he goes instinctively still — is the one who brings it up, of all the women of great beauty and what Matt would prefer to call distinct character who Matt has allowed into his heart and his life. She is naked, head to toe, without her customary earrings (a click on the dresser) or the powder she usually wears (faintly scented, and the brush is not synthetic), and she runs a painted nail lightly along the dip of his cupid’s bow, and says: “Matthew, have you ever considered how you would look in lipstick?”</p>
            </blockquote>





	all those wrong colors

**Author's Note:**

> Written for [this prompt](https://daredevilkink.dreamwidth.org/725.html?thread=698069#cmt698069). While I was writing this a fifth person sent me [this pie graph](https://31.media.tumblr.com/9d5d0fdb374fb2d1bc9aa0e4b4872e32/tumblr_inline_njl882Syg61sm4050.png) again, completely unconnected to the first four times people have sent me that. You still weren't wrong.

Vanessa — yes, she asks him at first, in the morning, when she is still tangled in her sheets (cotton, but with a sufficiently high thread count that it isn’t as much of a sensory issue as it could be) and he is dressing for the day, before she rises in a fall of fabric and fixes his tie, laying her hands flat on his chest as he goes instinctively still — is the one who brings it up, of all the women of great beauty and what Matt would prefer to call distinct character who Matt has allowed into his heart and his life. She is naked, head to toe, without her customary earrings (a click on the dresser) or the powder she usually wears (faintly scented, and the brush is not synthetic), and she runs a painted nail lightly along the dip of his cupid’s bow, and says: “Matthew, have you ever considered how you would look in lipstick?”

So she’s the one who asks, and yes, Matt has actually considered it. Cosmetics are abstract to him but he understands them in the same way that he understands clothing and perfume. They are a layer of expression and concealment, of projecting one’s self and prioritizing certain traits, and more than enough people have remarked on his expressive mouth — _generous_ , they say, usually — that even Matt can’t dismiss it as a fluke.

Lipstick, though, presents complications: on his skin it is evident to him in its texture, its waxiness and its scent, but on his sheets, or the starched white of his shirts, or on a glass that he has yet to place to his lips, it is difficult to detect. From Foggy’s exasperated comments and machinations, Matt has learned that for something designed to stay on the lips, lipstick tends to get everywhere, and to stay there. It seems like more trouble than it’s worth.

Still, Matt takes to lingering when Vanessa does her makeup for the day. He finds the interplay of scent and sound oddly relaxing, from the whisper of her brushes to the way her heartbeat slows, and he can hear her breathing get shallower as she traces along her lash line, until she sets the pencil down with a click. Vanessa is blotting at her lips with a folded tissue — Matt can hear the fibers sticking slightly — when, eventually, he asks her if she would, for him, one night.

“Of course,” Vanessa says, and crumples the tissue, discarding it with a rustle. “A nice — dark red, I think, the type that, when you wipe it off, leaves you looking deliciously kissed, how does that sound?”

“I trust your judgment,” Matt says, smiling, and inclines his head in thanks, and goes out to meet Foggy in the Landman and Zack lobby for cart coffee and commiseration and, eventually, work.

So, that evening: Vanessa switches on the light on her vanity and settles Matt on his knees on the carpet, soft tee and soft sweats after a long day. First, she rubs a warm washcloth across his mouth, and Matt feels the heat leach into his skin, lets his mouth fall open, and she runs a cloth-covered finger between his lips. Next, a dry cloth, unexpectedly rough, and Matt endures it more than he enjoys it, but then that too joins the washcloth in a bowl and he hears the tick of Vanessa uncapping a pencil and the whisper of wood shavings as she sharpens it.

“Tilt your chin up,” she tells him, and Matt does, closing his eyes as she sets her thumb to the corner of his mouth. “Make an O,” Vanessa says, and Matt does that too, rounding his lips. It feels silly — he’s sure he looks ridiculous — but Vanessa tilts his head towards her, hand on his cheek, and sets the tip of the pencil to his skin, and that narrows down to a fine point. She draws neat outlines of the corners of his lips, fingertips on his jaw for steadiness, and then traces his cupid’s bow freehand, a lazy swoop with tight corners. When Vanessa traces the curve of his lower lip, Matt has to suppress the urge to tip his head to follow the pressure.

The odd tugging of the pencil tip as Vanessa fills in his lips is not precisely comfortable, but Matt doesn’t register it as such; for some reason, any contact just amplifies the pleasant hum he’s feeling at the base of his skull, and sends it fizzing down his spine. She finishes shading, sets the pencil down (it rolls a little), and takes his face between her hands, tilting it to and fro. “That’s very nice,” she says, appreciatively. “Dark, not quite oxblood, but getting there. Now — a true red,” she says, and opens a drawer, clicks over the tubes inside with her nails, plucks one out.

In the end, it’s not the lipstick, really. Matt could take or leave the scent, covering up synthetics, and the way it feels waxy on his mouth, and tacky as it dries. Vanessa places a folded tissue between his lips, and tells him to close his mouth; she uses a nail to wipe at the very edge of his lower lip, to accentuate his cupid’s bow, and it’s her undivided attention which has Matt fighting the impulse to nudge into her hand, to push his face against her palm.

“Let me see you,” Vanessa says, and Matt turns obediently towards where he remembers the light to be, her hand a solid, grounding pressure on the nape of his neck. “Shall I tell you how it looks, Matthew?”

“Please,” Matt says, “yes,” and she taps the tips of her fingers on his shoulders as she thinks.

“You look,” she says, finally, when he is breathing according to every eighth tap, “the way that wild roses smell, lush and undoubtedly ornamental. Like smoke and broken glass. You look so pretty like this, Matthew,” she says, and he arches into the words, a little, hungry and aware of the heat in his face, undoubtedly a flush burning in his cheeks. “Oh?” Vanessa says. “You like that?”

Matt tries to turn his face away, lean into her hand — perhaps press a stained kiss to the ball of her thumb — but she holds him still and leans in and asks again. “Matthew,” she says, and she isn’t using her nails, or even particularly hurting him, but he can’t move, and when she asks: “Did you like that?” he has to answer.

“Yes,” he says, on an exhale, and then, just in case he wasn’t clear, repeats it, enough that he can feel the way his lips are a little dry now, lipstick drying matte.

“What did you like?” she asks, because — she wants to hear him say it, he realizes; she wants to look at his red, red mouth, his long lashes, the flush that he can feel spreading down his neck — she is a woman of particulars, of specifics, and she wants to hear it from him.

“When you called me pretty,” he says, “I liked it.”

“Good,” she says, and kisses his forehead, strokes gentle fingers over his throat, straightens the collar of his shirt and smooths her palms over his shoulders before she puts her hands to his chest and pushes him back to support himself on his elbows. “Because you are, Matthew,” she says, rising from her chair to straddle him, settle with her dress pushed up over her hips and her hand on his heartbeat.

Vanessa continues. “You’re so pretty—” and she might not be able to feel it, but she can see his heartbeat pick up in the pink that has spread down his neck, and the way his eyes, briefly, flutter open “—so pretty, Matthew, with your lips all red for me, so good. Come on, then,” and she rolls her hips against his, grinds down against him in a slow press. Matt’s hard, and his hands are pressed into the carpet, and his head is back. He gasps when she does it again, and while she always loves to lavish attention on his mouth, his vocalizations are so much more noticeable in crimson.

“You look so good, all preened and posed,” she says, “but you can touch — hands only — if you tell me how you feel, Matthew.”

He arches at that, pressing up even harder, and says, “oh, God, Vanessa, I—”

“Yes,” she prompts, and digs her nails into his shoulders, elbows on his chest, leaning over to watch him struggle. “Yes, what’s the word?”

“Pretty,” he sobs, finally, and slumps, as if the fight has gone out of him. He is still gasping, but completely loose-limbed, save for his hands, still flat and tense. “Pretty, God, please—”

“Well done,” Vanessa says, and he reaches for her, one hand on her hip where the fabric of her dress is bunched and the other pushing at the silk of her underwear, fingertips catching on the fabric as he finds his way by touch and the sound of her breaths, her satisfied sigh when he thumbs over her clit and the way her exhale breaks into clipped breaths as he circles around it, teasing.

Vanessa is wet — enough to add luxury to the slide of his fingers through the fabric, not enough to entirely cut the rasp of it — and she digs her nails in even harder as he presses his fingers up hard, but then pulls away before she can shove her hips against them.

“I’ll make you say it again,” she threatens, and his grip on her hip tightens. She can’t tell whether he wants her to or if he dreads it, and instead of puzzling it out she reaches for the drawer of the bedside table and snags a condom, slipping out of her underwear as she goes, before settling back over him, and she lets him hear the crinkle of the wrapper before she rises up on her knees. “Down,” she says, tapping at his hip with her free hand, and he shoves his sweats down to mid-thigh. “Good,” Vanessa says, and smiles, and when she rolls it down over him, he presses his lips together and fails to stifle a choked-back whine.

When she sinks down onto him, finally, his fingers curl, and she thinks that he must be desperate for purchase, so Vanessa takes his hands and places them on her hips — not to regulate her pace, but to feel it twice over — and squeezes his wrists, as tightly as she can without digging in her nails.

“What you are,” she says, breaking up her words to match her pace, “is _pretty_ , Matthew, so pretty and so good for me—” she pauses, gasps for breath “—the finest of fine things, Matthew,” and he’s meeting her now, thrust for thrust, though his hands are still loose at her hips. “Look at you, at your mouth, God.”

She drags his hand from her hip, then, to where she’s stretched around him, and lets go of his wrist to dig her fingernails into his shoulder again. “Show me,” she says. “Make it good for me.”

He does, too; traces up her cunt when she rises onto her knees, and pushes just so when she’s flush to his body, pressed tight against him. Matt’s mouth is open, lipstick dry now but as bright as ever, and Vanessa realizes that the word he’s gasping, over and over, is “please”: please, God, please, Vanessa, please, please, please.

“I want to see you,” Vanessa says, then, “come on, let me see you, let me see that pretty, pretty mouth of yours — God, so pretty—” and Matt arches so hard that it knocks the breath out of her, fingers so good and right there, and she gasps in shock when she comes. Vanessa blinks, and so she sees Matt coming apart in freeze-frames: first, his neck bare, one hand splayed for leverage; second, the way his breath comes in heaving gasps, and the stutter of his hips; third, the noise he makes, almost one of agony, and his slow slump back to the carpet, and on, and on.

Vanessa rides it out, hips jerking against his stomach, and slumps to lie on Matt’s chest, chin propped up on his breastbone, sated.

“Matthew,” she says, fondly, and his eyes flutter open. “You’re pretty,” she says, almost coquettish, stroking his cheek with her thumb, “and ravished — you look positively _lush_ — and my beautiful boy,” Vanessa says, and tilts his chin up with one hand to kiss him on his red, red mouth, messy and gorgeous as ever.


End file.
